UNFOLDING OLANA

In 2023, Site-Specific Dances, led by Artistic Directors Michael Spencer Phillips and Dino Kiratzidis, received support from the Charles E. Culpeper Arts & Culture program of the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund to create an ambitious new work responding to OLANA- the artist-designed environment created by the Hudson River School painter, Frederic Church. Church worked across mediums (painting, landscape design, architecture, environmentalism, exhibition design) - an early ‘interdisciplinarian’. At Olana, the physical landscapes are framed by the house design as animated paintings, while Church's paintings of landscapes were immersive and photorealistic. Unfolding Olana explores this relationship - between representation and physical space.

The project is being developed in three phases:

a performance residency at the Olana State Historic Site in 2023,
a residency and work-in-process performance at the Rockefeller estate in 2024;
the anticipated public programming of the piece in 2025/2026.

Last summer, Site-Specific Dances completed a creative residency at the Olana State Historic Site, hosted by The Olana Partnership. This creative residency provided the opportunity to engage with the legacy and ideas of Frederic Church and to film a series of site-specific dance/film vignettes.

This year, Unfolding Olana will continue to be developed in a performance residency at the Rockefeller Estate, culminating in a ‘work-in-process’ performance and presentation at the David Rockefeller Arts Center in Tarrytown, NY on August 8, 2024, at 7pm. This performance will include two dance/media works from S-SD’s existing repertory, followed by a 30-minute work-in-process presentation of Unfolding Olana, featuring live dance, film, animations and live new music. The performance is the culmination of a two week creative residency supported by the Charles E. Culpeper Arts & Culture program of the Rockefeller Brothers’ Fund.

More than a house or a landscape, Church designed Olana as a three-dimensional work of art that includes the ‘viewshed’ (borrowed views beyond the immediate site). Responding to the multiple scales at play, Unfolding Olana is presented in three sections: HOUSE, LANDSCAPE, and VIEWSHED. Bringing together live dance, new music, and media, the presentation explores the physical spaces of Olana through video documentation of site-specific choreography and the “conceptual space” of the site through diagrammatic animations.

While Church is best known for landscape paintings that can be seen in Hudson River School rooms in museums around the country, Unfolding Olana aims to bring Olana into other cultural spaces, broadening the public’s perception of his work, putting the site in conversation with contemporary performance.

Unfolding Olana will feature commissioned new music by composers Phong Tran and Darian Donovan Thomas.

The performance will be followed by a discussion and audience Q&A with the creative team, and a reception.

Presented in partnership with the RBF’s Culpeper Arts & Culture program.

Special Thanks: The Olana Partnership and New York State Parks.

Pocantico Performance Photographs: Susan Nagib.

SCALE I. HOUSE

“ Of all the devices integral to Church’s new house the most important for cultivating thoughts about nature was a varied series of spaces that erode the separation of interior and exterior … the Piazza, Round Veranda, and Bell Tower “ - Barry Bergdoll, “In Frederic Church’s Umbra”

Church’s house at Olana is a machine for viewing the landscape. Employing view corridors, a system of apertures that frame views like paintings, and a series of liminal indoor/outdoor rooms, the house design breaks down the experiential barrier between inside and outside. A dance solo by Michael Spencer Phillips occupies this threshold, interwoven with analytical animations that explore the spatial and optical ideas at play.

Original Music: Phong Tran
Live Performers: Michael Spencer Phillips, Phong Tran, Darian Donovan Thomas

SCALE II: LANDSCAPE

Section II draws inspiration from painting galleries, and gallery wall composition, placing the viewer in a room of animated landscape paintings drawn from many parts of the Olana State Historic Site. The immersive media is arranged in a sequence from morning to dusk.

Original Music: Darian Donovan Thomas
Dancers: Jaqlin Medlock, Justin Rainey, Katherine Kiessling, Tracy Dunbar, Ashley LaRosa, Charles Scheland, Cori Lewis
Live music: Darian Donovan Thomas and Phong Tran

SCALE III: VIEWSHED

Church designed Olana as a three-dimensional work of art that includes borrowed views beyond the immediate site. A series of performance animations present a provocation - what if you could stage a performance that filled the entire viewshed? A virtual performance / simulation, imagines large formations of dancers in the distant view, dancers as topography covering vast terrains - in conversation with energetic live ensemble dance, choreographed by Michael Spencer Phillips. The St. Lawrence Concrete Factory makes an appearance as a fleeting antagonist, representing the specter of industrial development, a threat not only to the views essential to Olana, but also to the preservation of the natural environment. The Olana Partnership and other community stakeholders were able to stop its construction, representing an inspiring alliance between art history and environmentalism - as Church himself would likely have championed.

Original Music: Phong Tran
Dancers: Jaqlin Medlock, Justin Rainey, Katherine Kiessling, Tracy Dunbar, Ashley LaRosa, Charles Scheland, Cori Lewis
Live music: Darian Donovan Thomas and Phong Tran